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How what happened in Vegas… created a great campaign for Lynx

Guest post from Silvina Moronta, brandgym Partner for Latin America

Once again the Lynx team has showed us how smart brand teams capitalize opportunities by being responsive to what's happening in the real World. While newspapers and magazines across the world published photographs of the partying Prince Harry naked, this was what Lynx said about Prince Harry's wild weekend in Las Vegas:

This print ad quickly went viral, even in countries like Argentina where the brand has a different name (Axe instead of lynx) showing that consumers valued the brand cleverness, sense of humour, creativity and reactivity to current events.

To get some inside insight on this campaign, I contacted Victor Fernandez Lahore (Unilever Media VP and ex Lynx/Axe global team). “In Lynx/Axe there is a tradition to make this type of ad., because we believe the brand should be immersed in the real World, present in the
mating game situations that are in the buzz”, he said. “Internally, the process to be responsive flows easily cause there
is budget specifically allocated for this type of situation.”

To illustrate how the Prince Harry ad was not a one-off, he reminded me of another print from Lynx, back in 1998, when President Bill Clinton had his private "session" at The Whitehouse with intern Monica Lewinsky.

Further insight came on the responsiveness of the brand team and agency came from talking today to Tomas
Marcenaro, Lynx/Axe Global Brand Director. “It was Friday evening. BBH called me and told they had a print ad to
share. In a couple of minutes I received it by mail and loved it! In 30 minutes
it was all approved to place it in The Sun.” He went on to describe the relationship with the agency that makes this sort of work possibe: “They know that we value spontaneous creativity. They are empowered and motivated to develop pieces WITHOUT a
brief, like this.”

In conclusion, for those who want to learn from Lynx/Axe on how to act on news:

1. It all starts with a good brand vision: do you have a clear vision that acts as a "GPS" for every marketing action, and defines in which territory/theme your brand has to be present in? (Lynx clearly knows their territory is the mating game)

2. Be open to real word situations: is your brand team immersed in consumer hot topics or stressed by day to day internal discussions about processes and things that do not add value to consumers? (The Lynx team is specially open to capturing situations that could be interesting for the brand)

3. Last, but not least, to be spontaneous plan resources in advance. Do you have special budget allocated in case an opportunity for your brand appears at any moment, like the Lynx team does?

For more insight on how brand teams need to be reactive, see this post here on "How brand teams need to act like a newsroom", based on an interview with P&G's CMO Marc Pritchard.